Slavery Doomed; Or, the Contest Between Free and Slave Labour in the United States Book

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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
" Be not, then, discouraged. What you have written will do a great deal of good; and could you still trouble yourself about our welfare, no man is more able to help the labouring side." REASONS WHY SLAVERY HAS BEEN ABOLISHED IN SOME STATES AND RETAINED IN OTHERS. When the North American colonies resolved upon independence of the mother country, and victory had crowned their efforts, they found much difficulty in agreeing upon such a Federal Constitution as would not interfere with conflicting rights and interests. Slavery had existed in each and every of those colonies, but in some it had been abolished. Although Slavery had thus been got rid of in the North, and retained in the South, we must not look for the reason of that abolition or retention in geographical and climatial causes alone. In no portion of the United States is the weather too hot for white men to labour in the open air, and there is no occupation in which the African race is employed —from Virginia to Florida—which the Caucasian cannot equally perform. The cultivation of cotton, the main staple of the South, is one of the least laborious in agriculture; so much so that our West Indian planters are opposed to its introduction into Jamaica and other islands, knowing that it will draw off their hands from the cultivation of sugar. In the southernmost portions of the Union, railroad and other engineering works are carried on mainly by white men, and this labour is infinitely more trying than that of agriculture. Yet, ifwe examine the rates of 1 mortality in the different States (not merely during a single year, which might be an exceptional one, hut over a decennial period), we find that the ratio of mortality amongst the whites is considerably higher in the northern than in the southern portions of the ...